If the breaker trips when nothing is turned on it could be a mouse problem. If it only trips when certain lights or appliances are turned on one of them is probably the reason.If it trips when nothing is being turned on or off something is getting hot. You should then have qualified electrician look at it. Hope this is usefull.
The need to de energize the circuit the breaker is feeding is a cause to have a circuit breaker switched off. If you are referring to a breaker tripping off, the cause would be from an overload condition being applied to the circuit, the breaker sensing it and shutting the circuit off.
The electromagnet in the circuit breaker is used for instantaneous tripping if short-circuit condition arises. At defined current level the electromagnet develops the force high enough to cause the tripping of the mechanism.
A circuit breaker trips because the circuit is overloaded. Put another way, the circuit is drawing too much current for the rating of the breaker.
A bad breaker
It means that the person has to go and re set the breaker. If people understood that the tripping of the breaker is a safety device and by its tripping it might have just saved them some money. By preventing a fault that a short circuit or an overload could cause might just have stopped a potential house fire.
A breaker will keep tripping until the fault that caused it to trip is corrected. That's what it is designed to do. There's either a circuit overload or a short circuit. How fast the breaker trips can indicate how overloaded it is. If you are very close to the rating of the breaker you can actually trip it over time. If you are definitely over the breaker will usually trip instantly. If there is a short circuit you can usually tell that by how violently the breaker trips. If you have conduit you can hear the wires banging around in the pipe. A frequently tripping breaker may also be faulty and need to be replaced - breakers are designed to fail by tripping prematurely rather than by not tripping at all, as this is much safer. This is very often the case for breakers that trip at seemingly random intervals, often when very little load is being drawn.
A circuit breaker will trip if it is faulty or if the connected circuit has a short circuit or a connected device is trying to draw more current than the breaker rating. If you disconnect the output wire from the breaker and it still trips, it is a faulty breaker. If the breaker is tripping immediately when it is turned on then start disconnecting elements of the circuit to see what might be causing the problem. If everything was working and now isn't, it is likely that the wire from the breaker is nicked where it exits the box and is shorting to the feedthru connector.
An open circuit won't cause any overheating because no current is flowing. Other faults like ground fault or a breaker tripping should happen fast enough not to cause any overheating either.
Yes but it's redundant and may cause unnecessary "tripping" of the circuit. The GFCI circuit breaker is intended to protect an entire receptacle circuit whereas a GFCI receptacle is designed to protect only that receptacle and any which are provided power from its load side. (downstream)
There are two conditions that would cause a breaker to trip off. One is an overload of the circuit and the other is a short circuit on the circuit. The heating element within the breaker is what monitors for circuit overloads.
A bad circuit breaker. Replace it.
A short circuit on the system will cause a breaker instantaneously trip.